Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
JACKSON, MS. — Can you hate the federal government but love the money it spends on you?
The electoral earthquake that was Mississippi’s Republican Senate primary has pushed this question to the forefront of American politics.
In conventional terms, the success of state senator Chris McDaniel in outpolling Thad Cochran, a 34-year Senate veteran, on Tuesday and forcing him into a runoff was a triumph for the Tea Party movement. Outside conservative groups such as FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth spent millions trying to oust a gracious and civil incumbent they saw as far too cozy with Washington’s big spenders.
If Cochran went to Washington to bring back what Mississippi needs — most crucially after Hurricane Katrina — McDaniel vowed he would fight D.C.’s expansive government and named Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee as his role models. McDaniel takes delight in the word “fight.”
Cochran had the support of the entire Mississippi Republican establishment, from the governor on down. These practical politicians understand how important Cochran’s senior role on the Appropriations Committee is for their state and relish the idea that Cochran would become chairman again if the GOP wins the majority in the Senate.
“By God’s grace, he was chair of Appropriations for two years during Katrina and it made all the difference in the world,” former Governor Haley Barbour said in an interview last month. Cochran was pondering retirement, but “a lot of people” told him, “Thad, don’t put yourself first. Put Mississippi first.”
Barbour and his allies did all they could for their friend, but there was that nagging contradiction at the heart of their argument: Cochran said he was as stoutly conservative and penny-pinching as McDaniel, but also the agent for many good things that come this state’s way courtesy of the despised national capital. Mississippi taxpayers get $3.07 back for every $1 they send to Washington, according to Wallet Hub, a personal finance website. The Tax Foundation ranks Mississippi No. 1 among the states in federal aid as a percentage of state revenue.
Strange numbers, you’d think, for a Beltway-hating state, but Marty Wiseman, the former director of the Stennis Institute at Mississippi State University, explained the apparent inconsistency. “Our anti-Washington politics has been to make sure that we got as much of it here as we could,” he said. “You’ve got the Tea Party excited that they’ve corralled a big spender, but he was bringing it back to Mississippi. That’s the paradox of all paradoxes.”
Indeed. “If Mississippi did what the Tea Party claims they want … we would become a Third World country, quickly,” said Rickey Cole, the state Democratic chairman. “We depend on the federal government to help us build our highways. We depend on the federal government to fund our hospitals, our health care system. We depend on the federal government to help us educate our students on every level.”
Cole noted that the hospital he was born in “wasn’t built by the taxpayers of Mississippi, it was built with federal money that was collected from taxpayers in New York and Chicago and L.A. and San Francisco.”
To survive a runoff, Cochran may now have to face up to the incongruity of trying to be an anti-spending spender by challenging the core of the McDaniel case. As it became clear late Tuesday night that Cochran would fall short, Stuart Stevens, one of the GOP’s top political consultants and a Cochran loyalist, previewed for reporters a line of inquiry that will be familiar to liberals.
McDaniel, Stevens said, “is always talking about cutting spending. No one has ever asked Chris McDaniel what he’s going to cut.” Stevens added: “Is he going to cut community colleges in his district? Is he going to cut highway funds to his district?”
These queries will certainly appeal to Democrat Travis Childers, the rather conservative former member of Congress who handily won his party’s Senate nomination on Tuesday. Cochran supporters believe that a McDaniel nomination could lead to the unthinkable. “The concern is that this would open the door for a potential Democratic senator,” Philip Gunn, the Republican Speaker of the Mississippi House, told me the night before the primary. Childers’ “chances against McDaniel are better than his chances against Cochran.”
Yes, Childers could run as a Thad Cochran Democrat — except he wouldn’t be saddled with the need to appease an ideology that has to pretend federal spending doesn’t benefit anybody, least of all the people of Mississippi.
E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.
AFP Photo/Jonathan Ernst
Want more political analysis? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!
Listening to Republicans in Congress wailing incessantly about our spendthrift culture raises a nagging question: What would they do, besides talking, if they actually wanted to reduce federal deficits and, eventually, the national debt?
First, they would admit that President Obama’s policies, including health care reform, have already reduced deficits sharply, as promised. Second, they would desist from their hostage-taking tactics over the debt ceiling, which have only damaged America’s economy and international prestige. And then they would finally admit that basic investment and job creation, rather than cutting food stamps, represent the best way to reduce both deficits and debt, indeed the only way — through economic growth.
Fortunately for those Republicans and sadly for everyone else, the American public has little comprehension of current fiscal realities. Most people don’t even know that the deficit is shrinking rather than growing. According to a poll released on Feb. 4 by The Huffington Post and You.gov, well over half believe the budget deficit has increased since 2009, while less than 20 percent are aware that it has steadily decreased. (Another 14 percent believe the deficit has remained constant during Obama’s presidency.)
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it is Republican voters, misinformed by Fox News, who most fervently and consistently insist on these mistaken ideas, with 85 percent telling pollsters that the deficit has increased. Less than a third of Democrats gave that answer. But nearly 60 percent of independent voters agree with the Republicans on that question and only 30 percent of Democrats understand the truth – an implicit repudiation, as The Huffington Post noted, of the president’s political decision to prioritize deficit reduction rather than job creation.
The facts are simple enough even for a Tea Party politician to understand. The federal deficit reached its peak – in dollar amount and as a share of the national economy – in 2009, which happens to be the year that Obama took office. Thanks to the profligate war and tax policies of the Bush administration — which undid the fiscal stabilization achieved under President Clinton — the Treasury had no financial margin when the Great Recession struck. Federal spending required to avoid another (and possibly far worse) worldwide Depression, combined with declining tax revenues that resulted from economic stagnation and tax cuts, all led inevitably to that record deficit.
Over the past five years, the red ink has swiftly faded. This year’s deficit will be about $514 billion, or about one-third of the $1.5 trillion deficit in 2009; next year’s will be even lower, at around $478 billion. As when Clinton was president, those marked fiscal improvements are mainly the product of a slowly recovering economy and growing incomes, along with federal budget cuts.
But not only is the good news about the shrinking deficit widely ignored; it isn’t actually good news at all. By avoiding a mostly mythical “budget crisis,” federal policy has created a very real jobs crisis that persists, with particular harm to working families. The latest Congressional Budget Office report on the fiscal outlook for the coming decade strongly suggests that the cost of reducing the deficit has been – and will continue to be – substantial losses in potential economic growth and employment.
The ironic consequence, as former White House economist Jared Bernstein recently explained, is that the fiscal outlook for the next 10 years will be somewhat dimmer than expected. In other words, we will return to higher deficits because fiscal austerity –enforced by Republicans and accepted by Obama — is still dragging the economy down.
To restore the kind of growth that lets families prosper and ultimately erases deficits, the Republicans would have to listen to the president — especially when he calls for public investment in infrastructure and an increased minimum wage, the first steps toward robust growth and fiscal stability.
If Americans understood the truth about deficits and debt – and how the federal budget affects their jobs and income – the congressional obstruction caucus, also known as the GOP, would have no other choice.
Photo: Speaker Boehner via Flickr
MCT NEWSFEATURES
By David Lightman
McClatchy Washington Bureau
(MCT)
WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner is making deals again.
After three years of taking tough stands pushed by no-compromise tea party types — positions that ultimately led to last fall’s partial government shutdown — he’s returned to his roots as a conservative consensus-builder, and suddenly the House of Representatives is passing major bipartisan legislation.
He remains on fragile ground. The Republicans he leads in the House are still fractured over some of the day’s biggest issues, notably immigration and federal spending. But he’s returning to his roots as a dealmaker, and the result is a House that’s moving toward compromise, and action.
Since December, Boehner has pushed through budget deals crafted with Democratic support. He’s moved compromise legislation on farm policy. He’s led the effort to write immigration principles that include a path to legal status for those who are already in the country illegally.
Whether the 64-year-old Ohio Republican, now in his fourth year as speaker, continues to build on his newfound stature as the great compromiser might determine how his party fares in Congress and in November’s congressional elections. Also to be determined is how history regards Boehner.
“For years, he gave his caucus veto power over deals he could negotiate,” said Darrell West, the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a research group. “The result was that he couldn’t cut any deals.”
In his new role as compromiser, “It creates problems with his caucus,” West said, “but it strengthens him as speaker.”
Many conservatives aren’t buying that. “He’s still figuring out how to be speaker,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action for America. “Conservatives who gave Republicans the majority think he should be a speaker who pushes the most conservative causes that he can.”
Boehner’s emergence as a consensus-builder began during October’s 16-day partial government shutdown. Hard-core conservatives pushed the strategy, their latest tactic in a yearslong war to dramatically cut federal spending.
Privately, Boehner wasn’t comfortable with the confrontational tactics. He was long known as a dealmaker, someone who could argue the conservative cause but bend enough to get things passed. He was a familiar sight in the speaker’s lobby in the back of the House chamber, smoking and schmoozing, and he helped write major education legislation a decade ago with the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
In 2010, though, the tea party was ascendant, vowing to pare the size of government once and for all. The grass-roots movement was instrumental in electing 87 House Republican freshmen that year — and making Boehner the speaker. Claiming a mandate, tea party members pressed for budget battles rather than compromise. The shutdown was their ultimate weapon.
“He would talk about how dumb that strategy was. He thought it was a fool’s errand, but he had an obligation as a leader to execute it,” said former Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, a Boehner friend who’s now the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a moderate group.
The shutdown, ironically, helped Boehner.
Many conservatives appreciated his embrace of the strategy, not only because he embraced it publicly but also because it isolated and even discredited the hardest of the hard core, while establishment Republicans liked his private reluctance.
On Dec. 11, Boehner made his declaration of independence.
Hard-core conservative groups blasted a budget agreement negotiated by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-WA)that averted another shutdown.
Boehner regarded Ryan as a virtual little brother; the two had long been friends. Ryan had gone out on limbs for the conservatives, including budget plans that took the politically risky step of revamping Medicare and Social Security. When the conservatives ripped Ryan, Boehner was furious.
“They’re using our members and they’re using the American people for their own goals. This is ridiculous,” he said. “Listen, if you’re for more deficit reduction, you’re for this agreement.”
The agreement passed with 169 Republican and 163 Democratic votes. But the right made it clear that it still wasn’t satisfied; 62 Republicans voted no. A month later, 64 opposed a more detailed spending bill. Last week, 63 voted no on a farm bill that passed.
Meeting last week at a retreat in Cambridge, Md., Republican leaders worked to present a unified front. It wasn’t easy, and there were signs that any consensus on the two most incendiary issues — immigration and debt — is shaky at best.
Conservatives were unhappy about the immigration principles. Boehner chose his words carefully as he described to colleagues what the statement meant.
“These standards are as far as we’re willing to go,” he said.
There was also turmoil over raising the debt limit. The government needs new authority from Congress to pay its bills, probably sometime this month. President Barack Obama wants to pass it with no conditions. Conservatives want some assurances that spending will be reduced or the Affordable Care Act will be trimmed.
Boehner doesn’t want an ugly fight. “We know what the obstacles are that we face. But listen, we believe that the defaulting on our debt is the wrong bet,” he said.
So far, Boehner — with the backing of Republican Party officials — wants to present easy-to-understand alternatives to Democratic ideas.
“If we’re just seen as the opposition party … we miss a great opportunity to actually woo voters over to our side, because, frankly, we have really good alternatives,” said Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The wild card in this strategy is likely to be a string of congressional primaries this winter and spring. Tea party candidates are challenging incumbents in several states, and if the insurgents do well, their Capitol followers will be energized.
That threat, though, is for another day. For now, Brookings’ West figured, “Boehner is thinking about his legacy. A speaker is judged by what he or she passes.
“He doesn’t want to go down in history as a weak speaker.”
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
The National Memo is a political newsletter and website that combines the spirit of investigative journalism with new technology and ideas. We cover campaigns, elections, the White House, Congress, and the world with a fresh outlook. Our own journalism — as well as our selections of the smartest stories available every day — reflects a clear and strong perspective, without the kind of propaganda, ultra-partisanship and overwrought ideology that burden so much of our political discourse.
